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  <title>Dramatron</title>
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  <div class='title'>
    <span class='main-title'>About Dramatron</span>
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    <p>
      <b>Dramatron</b> is a system that uses large language models that could be
      useful for authors for <b>co-writing</b> theatre scripts and screenplays.
      Dramatron uses hierarchical story generation for consistency across the
      generated text. Starting from a log line, Dramatron interactively
      generates character descriptions, plot points, location descriptions and
      dialogue. These generations provide human authors with material for
      compilation, editing, and rewriting.
    </p>
    <p>
      Dramatron is conceived as a writing tool and as a source of inspiration
      and exploration for writers. To evaluate Dramatron’s usability and
      capabilities, we engaged 15 playwrights and screenwriters in two-hour long
      user study sessions to co-write scripts alongside Dramatron.
    </p>
    <p>
      One concrete illustration of how Dramatron can be utilised by creative
      communities is how one playwright staged 4 heavily edited and rewritten
      scripts co-written alongside Dramatron. In the public theatre show, Plays
      by Bots, a talented cast of experienced actors with improvisational skills
      gave meaning to Dramatron scripts through acting and interpretation.
    </p>
    <p>
      During the development of Dramatron and through discussions with industry
      professionals, we made several important observations:
      <ul>
        <li>
          Dramatron is a <b>co-writing</b> system that has only been used in
          collaboration with human writers, and was not conceived or evaluated
          to be used autonomously.
        </li>
        <li>
          Dramatron’s top-down hierarchical story generation structure does not
          correspond to every writer's writing process.
        </li>
        <li>
          The output of a language model may include elements of the text used
          to train the language model. One possible mitigation is for the human
          co-writer to search for substrings from outputs to help to identify
          plagiarism.
        </li>
        <li>
          Dramatron may reproduce biases and stereotypes found in the corpus,
          and may generate offensive text. One possible mitigation is to use the
          <a href='https://perspectiveapi.com/'>Perspective API</a> for
          estimating toxicity scores of the language outputs, and filtering
          generations based on the Perspective API analysis.
        </li>
      </ul>
    </p>
    <p>
      We share many reflections in our published pre-print (Mirowski, Mathewson
      et al (2022)
      “<a href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14958'>
        Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals</a>.”),
      including how playwrights reflected that they  “wouldn't use [Dramatron]
      to write a full play,” and that Dramatron's output can be “formulaic.”
      Rather, they would use Dramatron for “world building,” for exploring
      alternative stories by changing characters or plot elements, and for
      creative idea generation.
    </p>
    <p>
      We are looking forward to learning if and how you might incorporate
      Dramatron into your own artistic practices. If you’d like to share
      thoughts, comments, or observations or have any questions, please contact
      us at <a href='mailto:dramatron@deepmind.com'>dramatron@deepmind.com</a>.
    </p>
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